....... \- - . f '\ ( I \ \ \\ i i I, /! . \ ; \ I ( 1 / ) f rEA NO. I.f: OF RAIN. 1 ;r 1 ......, f} Ii r . - J', (;V 1 1 j: . ,.. .:;:, .T A " , , '"' "'" "- "\ , ::.::. .... --"? C\ "'>,. 1- , J:=EAR. NO. 18 : il4AT 14ArS WILL COME EACK. the lie became a sin, and existence took on complications: he wasn't in a state of grace anymore. Catholicism planted a dissonance in him, he be- lieves, by rubbing against his grain. "Maybe it's good to have something big that's beyond you," he says philo- sophically. "All that magic and mojo power. Sin becomes ever so much more .. f" JUIcy. It can take Garcia all day to get out of his apartment. Always the last to bed, he is slow to get going in the morning and can spend hours puttering. He may start by listening to some music, any- thing from Haydn string quartets to the Butthole Surfers. He has always been an avid reader, and currently champions the books of Terence McKenna, an amateur anthropologist and a psyche- delic explorer. He may decide to fiddle with his Macintosh and generate some computer art, or open a sketch pad and begin to draw. It's suprising what a good drafts- man Garcia is. The best of his drawings are witty, spare, and whimsical. They're very different from his guitar playing- not so rigorous or so practiced. As a guitarist, he labors to make his playing look so easy. He never gets caught being showy or calling attention to his technical mastery. What you hear sometimes in a trademark Garcia solo is a plangent kind of longing, a striving after an unattainable per- fection. One evening, I went over to his apartment for dinner. We had some Chinese food cooked without any oil and, to prevent an overdose of health, some good champagne. After eating, we watched "Naked Lunch" on a laser disk. Garcia is a big fan of Burroughs; he considers the writer a paragon of weirdness. Midway through the film, a loud snoring noise interrupted the clacking mandibles on the soundtrack. I looked over, and Garcia was dozing, even though we'd been chatting a few seconds before. He kept sawing logs for about five minutes and then woke abruptly, as brIght and as cheery as ever. Falling asleep like that was a habit of his, he said. He could-and fre- quently did-take a catnap anywhere, in public or in private. There was some- thing revealing about the sudden sleep. He put out so much . energy all the. time that he was bound to run low ev- ery now and then. It seemed that for him the existential dilemma would al- ways be the same: How could you get to the edge of things without going over the edge? T HE last time I saw Garcia, the Dead were reluctantly in re- hearsal-they hate to rehearse-for a summer tour. Garcia's mood was still jolly. He was sticking to his fitness pro- gram and was eager for more oxygen, not less. He and Robert Hunter had written a couple of new songs that were as good, he said, as anything else they'd composed in a long time. (In DeadBase '91 the fans had strongly agreed that "the Dead should write more new materiaL") The future was opening up before him, and he had the optimistic manner of somebody who has started dreaming again in middle age. In the end, it seemed to me, the Dead's success isn't really so mysterious. They work hard and enjoy what they are doing. They never underestimate their fans, and give them full value for the dollar. People are delIghted to go to a concert and return home knowing that they got more than their money's worth. The Dead are intentionally responding to the need for JOY, celebra- tion, and ritual, and they have struck a nerve. The next major bit of fun in store for Garcia was a scuba-diving trip. He dashes off to Hawaii whenever he has a few free days in his busy schedule. "Diving takes up a lot of the space that drugs used to," he told me. "It's an ac- tive, physical form of meditation. I could never do a sitting meditation, lIke the Buddhists-I'm way too rest- less. In the water, you're weightless. It's so silent-you're like a thought. When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my head." A descent into the ocean, he went on, was similar to a dive through the layers of human consciousness: "You see the obvious stuff first, like the beautifully colored fish. Then maybe you notice a peculiar lichen on some coral, and then you notice something else. You learn re- flexively, always taking in information. Once I get going, I might fin around for a couple of miles. It's an ecstatic ex- perience, really. I love it almost as much as I love the music." .